Portrayals of Women in Pakistan by Réka Máté

Author:Réka Máté
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2023-06-19T15:41:15.302000+00:00

Celebration and despair – A son’s first birthday while the country’s society is oppressed by the state

The poem pahlī sālgirah (First birthday) deals with the contrary feelings of personal joy whilst one’s own country and society suffers. Written in a rhyming scheme where the two lines per couplet rhyme with each other the poem narrates the story of a mother who talks to her son on his first birthday. She is torn between the joy about her son and motherhood and the country’s decline she lives in. Comparing the day of his birth with the bright and calming shining moon, she portrays the night as black. People being helpless and frightened just stand by and watch while “[t]he very dark cloudy hurricane whirled on the earth’s countries.” As a hurricane destroys nearly everything in its path, irrespective of what measurements one applies, this seems to be a metaphor for Zia ul-Haq’s military coup and his Islamisation programme that restricted women’s rights. His government also prosecuted those who demonstrated against the regime to put them in prison or worse. Further, the mother remembers various contrasting details like the day when her son drinks milk at her breast while “the blood-sucking wild beast entered the cities.” Or when she applied a “small round mark of kājal” on his forehead to ward off evil at home, while “the shadow of bayonets had spread from house to house.” At yet another time, the mother remembers kissing her son’s face to take all his calamities, whereas other mothers see their sons eating dirt, a metaphor for dying. While her son lifted his head and smiled (for the first time), others were defeated and cried. Now, after a year of bringing her son up and enjoying motherly feelings, she does not know what to gift him on his birthday, where one sees “in every direction rains of fire”. The only things she decides to give him are therefore her stories, his fire-toys, which contained “several sparks of fire” and “after blowing up (the fire) [she] shall make a bonfire setting up as preparation.” These lines suggest her rebellion and participation against the regime, in the form of her journal Āvāz and her ongoing support and plan to add more fuel to it. At the end of the poem, she even advises her son to gain his own experiences and burn his fingers while playing “with heated charcoals” but eventually gives in when he shouts and offers him her hand to walk along with his mother.

Fahmīdah’s poem pahlī sālgirah is an account of the torn feelings between joy and desperation during the time of experiencing motherhood for a second time and Zia ul-Haq’s takeover and the accompanying oppression of freedom in Pakistan.

sāzish150 — Conspiracy

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